


Possibilities, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and the Love the Bananas

by rosa_acicularis



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-21
Updated: 2011-04-21
Packaged: 2017-10-18 11:27:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/188445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosa_acicularis/pseuds/rosa_acicularis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rose Tyler lives the life fantastic, her feet on the ground and her head in the stars. A Pete's World fic. With bananas.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The first time it happened, she was on a blind date. They’d only just begun the soup course and she was already contemplating various methods of escape, each one more improbable (and more likely to get her fired) than the last. She’d been daydreaming about elaborate diversions involving bread baskets and sonic explosives when the man sitting opposite her ( _Arnold? Archie?_ She couldn’t seem to recall) reached across the table and took her hand. 

“But I don’t want you to get the wrong impression, Rose – I’m not one of those blokes who can’t shut up about his vicious whore ex-girlfriend.” Alfred of the unpleasantly sweaty palms laughed. “God, no. That’s pathetic. The thing of it is, most men haven’t a clue what a _vicious whore_ is really like. But I – she took my dog, you know. Did I mention that?” 

“Your purebred brown and white Cavalier King Charles Spaniel named Spitzy?” Rose frowned, as if struggling to remember. “You may have brought it up. Once or twice.”

She tried to ease her hand from his grip, but he didn’t take the hint. His fingers tightened around hers, and she couldn’t help but eye her butter knife speculatively. _Better not_ , she told herself. Her mum would hardly appreciate it if yet another of her well-intentioned (if excruciating) set ups ended in the maiming of the bachelor in question.

Not that the incident with the fanged dustbins had been her fault. Not really. After all, a Torchwood employee was never truly off-duty, and who’d have guessed those bins would be able to roll so quickly on such tiny little wheels?

The other incident, however, had been entirely her fault. She was quite proud of her work on that one.

Curbing her bloodlust, she realised that Arthur was, impossibly, still talking. She wondered if the man ever needed to breathe.

“You’re probably too young to have been in a relationship like that – so much drama, on such a grand scale. _Epic_ , one might say. It’s exhilarating, really, sublime, no matter how nightmarish it can be at times.” The corner of his mouth curved upwards in a condescending smirk. “But I don’t suppose you can really understand something like that until you’ve felt it yourself.”

Rose smiled, showing teeth. “My last serious relationship was with a nine hundred-year-old, time-travelling alien from a dead planet. We were separated during a cataclysmic battle against not one, but _two_ different kinds of genocidal robots, and we can never see each other again, because if we did it would _literally_ destroy the universe.” She paused, and then added, “And the one next door.”

Algie blinked at her. “Oh.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “Oh.” She slipped her hand out from under his suddenly limp fingers and took a polite sip from her water glass. “Still, though. The trollop took your dog. That has to hurt.”   

“Yeah.” He looked slightly dazed, which was a considerable improvement upon his previous expression of ‘self-satisfied blowhard’. After several moments of welcome silence, he said, “You’ve shagged a nine hundred-year-old bloke?”

Her smile sharpened, turning positively dangerous. “Not exactly, no,” she said through gritted teeth.

And that was when, seemingly from out of nowhere, a banana fell into her gazpacho.

Whatever the man’s name, he never rang her for a second date.

++

“…and then I said, ‘Excuse me, waiter? There’s a banana in my soup.’”

Rose waited for the laugh, but it never came. Instead, he asked again, “A _banana_?”

She sighed and leaned back, resting her elbows on the counter of the break room kitchenette. “Yes, Mickey. A banana.”

“In your soup.”

She nodded. “That’s what I said.”

“Someone threw a banana into your soup.”

“Well, see, that’s the thing.” The microwave beeped and she popped the door open. The ripe smell of her instant cup of Pot Noodle filled the room. “I never did sort out where it came from.”

“Disgruntled greengrocer?” Jake offered without looking up from his newspaper.

“If it was, no one saw him. It was like it just…” She gestured vaguely to the space above her head with the spoon in her hand. “Appeared. Out of thin air.” She pulled the steaming noodles from the microwave. “And then splashed gazpacho on my new blouse.”

Jake turned to her, frowning. “The midnight blue front button with the Mandarin collar?”

Mickey shot him a glare from the other end of the table. “Mate. Do you have to?”

Jake shrugged, but Rose noticed a hint of mischief in his eyes. “It was a nice blouse.”

“Ta, Jake. It was.” She carried the noodles to the empty chair at the table and sat, tucking one leg beneath her. “Not really the point, though.”

Jake turned to Mickey. “What’s the point, again?”

Mickey folded his arms over his chest and smiled smugly at her. “The point is, she spent the rest of her date interrogating every poor sod in that restaurant, muttering to herself about transmat beams and alien fruit invasions, and once it gets back to Jackie that she’s scared off yet _another_ eligible bloke—”

“Suppose I don’t have to ask how it went last night, do I?” Pete Tyler said from the doorway. Unconsciously, both Mickey and Jake straightened in their chairs.

Rose gave him a wan smile. “He was an idiot.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Pete replied evenly as he walked to the coffeemaker, ceramic ‘World’s Best Dad’ mug in hand. Rose and Mickey exchanged an amused look; a man as powerful as Pete Tyler hardly needed to fetch his own coffee, much less travel the three floors down to Recovery and First Contact to get it. Yet two or three days a week he spent his five minutes of precious free time with a woman who was not his daughter, a man who was not her boyfriend, and a man who may (or may not) have been _his_ boyfriend. Pete poured his coffee and sipped at it gingerly. “So,” he said, leaning back and resting his elbows on the counter just as Rose had done moments ago. “Should I be forming a taskforce to deal with an imminent invasion of alien fruit and veg?”

“No,” Mickey said.

“Maybe,” Rose said.

Pete looked to Jake, who shook his head. “I’m just sitting here, reading my paper. I am opinionless.”

“Spineless,” Mickey muttered, and Jake arched an eyebrow in his direction. Rose watched them and sighed inwardly; their epic saga of will-they-won’t-they had recently resolved itself (to neither man’s satisfaction) as they-will-but-just-the-once-because-appa

rently-they-are-both-idiots. They rarely let the tension interfere with their working camaraderie, but it was beginning to get under her skin nevertheless.

She turned back to Pete, who was also watching her friends carefully. “Probably not a full-scale invasion. Just something odd that happened at dinner last night.”

“How odd?”

“A banana appeared out of thin air and dropped into her gazpacho,” Mickey answered, snapping his attention away from his staring contest with Jake.

Pete paused. “That’s a bit surreal.”

“Exactly my point,” she replied with a triumphant look at Mickey.

“Quite surreal,” Pete said slowly. “Particularly given the fact that Jackie found three bananas in her lingerie drawer this morning.”   

There was a short, tense silence. “Does she know how they got there?” Jake asked.

Pete shook his head. “At first we thought that Reggie might have been…well, you know. Doing what Reggie does. But he claims he’s innocent.”

“Anyway,” Mickey added, “how many eight-year-old boys do you know who’d want to go digging through their mum’s knickers?” Jake opened his mouth to comment, but Mickey cut him off with a wave of his hand. “Don’t even start.”

Rose stared into her cooling cup of noodles and thought hard for a moment. Mickey was right; she’d have done anything to escape that date. And while two mysterious banana appearances in as many days were certainly suspicious, sometimes, she knew, a banana was just a banana.

When she looked up, all three men were watching her, waiting. Despite their years of experience and complete confidence in their own abilities, when things became exceptionally strange everyone still turned to her.  

She took a deep breath and said, “It’s nothing. Probably just a coincidence.”

Pete nodded. “Probably.” He glanced at his watch. “I have a conference call.”

“Foreign dignitaries and heads of state?” Mickey asked dryly.

“The headmaster of Reggie’s school, actually. He’s been talking back to his teachers and shutting school bullies in the toilets again.” He gave Rose a pointed look and she smiled, her expression open and innocent.

“Don’t blame me. That’s pure genetics at work.” 

The corner of his mouth quirked upward. “So you keep saying.” He moved to the door, but Rose called him back.  
     
“Pete?”

He turned to her, his hand resting on the doorframe. “Hmm?” 

“I…” She laughed a little nervously, and felt silly. “Mum doesn’t know about last night’s set up yet, and I was hoping—”

“Silent as the grave,” he assured her solemnly, his eyes twinkling. “Though you know she’ll find out anyway. She always does.” He left, and his still-full mug sat, forgotten, on the counter.

“He’s right, you know,” Mickey said, grinning. “You’re doomed.”

Rose took a sullen bite of her noodles and glared at him as she chewed.

++

A fortnight passed, unremarkably so. Rose went to the office and came home from the office, and in the time between there was a good deal of paperwork and disappointingly few explosions. She became the victim of a truly unfortunate haircut, which her mother approvingly called ‘posh’. Her car went into the shop and came out of the shop, and Mickey and Jake spent thirty minutes bickering over which of them could have fixed it faster and for free. Rose considered investing in earplugs and spent her lunch hour flipping through glossy travel brochures.

The days passed.

++

A Sunday morning, and late autumn light streamed in through the windows. The house was quiet.

Rose padded down the back staircase, the carpet soft beneath her bare feet. Though she’d moved out of the Tyler estate years ago, she still spent most of her time in her mother’s home. It was not the white, marble-floored mansion she and the Doctor had infiltrated so long ago; Pete had given that house up shortly after his first wife’s death. Now the Tylers lived in another mansion – as ridiculously massive as the first, but louder, warmer, messier.

It was little wonder that Rose preferred it to her own empty flat.

“Woo _hoo_! Now, that’s what I’m talking about. Eat my dust, little man!”

Mickey’s dulcet tones from the living room below reminded Rose that an empty flat had its advantages. Still, she grinned as she entered the room, skipping the last two steps of the staircase. Mickey and Reggie were sprawled across the rug, eyes locked on the television in front of them, their fingers moving furiously over their video game controllers.

“Morning, boys,” Rose said, perching on the arm of the sofa.

“Morning,” they repeated absently, their attention riveted to the game.

“I have a question for both of you.” 

To his credit, Reggie tore his eyes away from the telly and glanced over his shoulder at her. “Yeah?”

She was stuck again by the almost startling resemblance between her brother and herself. As he’d grown older, as his features had sharpened and his hair darkened to brown, she’d seen more and more of herself in him. Which was a bit disturbing, given what a ghastly little brat he could be at times.

She watched as the cars on the screen sped around the racetrack, occasionally ripping through scenery and pedestrians. After a moment she asked, “Did either of you sneak into my room last night while I was sleeping and hide a banana in my bed?”

Reggie groaned. “Not this again. Why does everyone always blame me?”

Mickey chuckled. “Well, mate, after the incident with the toad and the helium tank—”

“That was an _accident_.” He turned back to Rose and frowned. “Why would someone put a banana in your bed, anyway?”

A devilish grin split Mickey’s profile. “ _Well_ ,” he began, his voice rich with innuendo, but just then his car went hurtling off the racetrack and burst into flame. “Bollocks.”

Reggie dropped his controller, sat up, and stretched, the hem of his too-small Spiderman pyjama top riding up. “I win. Again.” He gave Mickey a sweetly sincere smile. “I could pretend to be surprised, if that’d make you feel better.”

“Shut it, pipsqueak.”

“Whatever you say, gramps.”

“Boys?” Rose interjected before things could deteriorate further. “Is that a ‘no’ on having any idea why I found one third of a well-balanced breakfast in my bed this morning?”

Reggie shrugged. “Wasn’t me, and Mickey was out all night.”

Rose turned to her friend, who suddenly looked anxious. “Oh _really_ ,” she said, unable to hide her delight. 

Reggie rolled his eyes. “He won’t say, but I bet he was at Jake’s. Doing, you know.” He made a face. “ _It_.” His tone made clear just what he thought of the grown-up obsession with such practices.   

Mickey yelped. “Reg!”

Her brother met her gaze and they shared a nearly identical grin. “He’s gonna get all stuttery and embarrassed now, isn’t he?”

Rose tried not to laugh. “Probably, yeah.”

Mickey closed his eyes and she could tell by his expression that he was counting slowly to ten. When he finished, he opened his eyes and said, “Not that it’s any of your business, munchkin, but Jake and I are not sleeping together.”

“Oh.” Reggie thought about this for a moment. “But you want to.”

A vein in Mickey’s forehead began to pulse worryingly, and Rose swooped in to the rescue. “Why don’t you two race again?”

Reggie sighed. “I’ve beat him too many times. It’s getting boring.”

“I let you win, and you know it.” Mickey pulled a glossy box from the shelf beside the television. “What about ‘Alien Slime Wars’? That’s always good for a laugh.”

Her brother shook his head. “I don’t like that game anymore. It’s really…” He glanced at Rose. “Xenophobic,” he finished, enunciating each syllable with care.

Mickey glared balefully at her. “This is your fault. You’re brainwashing him.”

“Oh, don’t be stupid. I am not.” She turned to Reggie. “Reg, am I brainwashing you?”

The boy considered this for a moment. “Maybe a little.” He grinned at Mickey. “And I _am_ sort of in the mood to blow up some alien scum.”

Mickey shot Rose a gloating look and pulled the game from the box. “Alien scum, it is.”

She sighed and slid down to curl in the corner of the sofa, pulling a blanket around her shoulders. “Fine, but I play the winner.”

The peaceful morning was broken by a resounding shriek from the kitchen. “Rose Marion Tyler, what did you _do_ to that poor, sweet man?”

Mickey grinned. “Sounds like word finally got ‘round to Jacks about your date.”

“ _Some_ body’s in _trou_ ble,” Reggie sing-songed.

In the ensuing mother/daughter shouting match, the tearful reconciliation that followed, and the large family brunch that followed that, Rose forgot about the ‘unexpected fruit in her bed’ issue entirely.

Until she returned to her flat that night and found the kitchen sink piled to the brim with barely ripe bananas.

++

After that, things got a little strange.

Bananas were appearing everywhere bananas should not: in the boot of her car, in her bathtub, beneath her favourite table at the café where she often ate dinner. Much to the misery of all, Jackie had taken to baking huge batches of banana bread, refusing to let the bunches that appeared daily at the Tyler estate go to waste. The office Rose shared with Mickey and Jake had to be emptied of bananas each morning, and they were running out of room in Containment to hold them all. When Rose discussed the appearances with the housekeeping director of the Torchwood facilities, he informed her that they’d been finding stray bananas throughout the building for weeks – mostly, he said, in her office and in the ladies toilet on the Recovery and First Contact floor.

A rather disturbing pattern was beginning to emerge. Or as Mickey put it: “Blimey, Rose. You’re being stalked by alien space monkeys.”

There was, of course, absolutely no proof of any alien involvement at all. Rose spoke with a few of her more unearthly contacts, and after they stopped laughing, they told her they’d never heard of such a thing. The mysterious bananary continued. 

Then one day the copy machine down the corridor from her office burst into flame. As this was rather unusual behaviour for a copy machine – even at Torchwood – the charred equipment was quickly and cautiously dissected by the people Torchwood employed for exactly that sort of thing. Rose struggled to be surprised by what they found, and failed. For lodged in the tight, delicate machinery of the copier, they’d discovered about one banana’s worth of smoking yellow pulp.

Mickey, Rose, and Jake stood around the laboratory table and stared at the banana mush-filled dish at its centre.

“They ran every test they could think of, and Schmidt says this one is just like the others,” Jake told them. “A perfectly normal, everyday banana.”

“Perfectly normal, everyday bananas don’t materialize out of thin air,” Mickey countered. “There’s no way anyone could have fit that banana inside that copy machine.”

Jake crossed his arms over his chest. “Could have dismantled it.”

“I think someone would have noticed, don’t you?” Mickey said, echoing his defensive posture.

Jake snorted. “So we’re back to the space monkey mafia theory, are we?”

“And I suppose you have a better idea.”

“A better idea than ‘monkeys did it’?” Jake said dryly. “Yeah, I think I just might.”

“Would you two just go have sex already and leave me the hell alone?” Rose snapped.

The men stared at her, shocked into silence, and a leaden guilt settled low in her stomach. She was about to apologise when a banana fell from nowhere and smacked Mickey in the face. Jake caught the piece of fruit before it hit the floor and set it on the table beside the dish. There was a long silence.

Jake rubbed his hand over his face. “Come on, Mick. We’ve got last month’s expense reports waiting.”

“Yeah, just…” Mickey sighed. “I’ll be there in a mo’.”

Jake nodded and left the room.

She leaned against the table, pressing her palms hard into the edge. “I’m sorry.”

He walked to her side and rested a comforting hand on her shoulder. “Don’t be. We shouldn’t fight at work like that.”

She tried to smile, but it was a weak attempt. “I wish you wouldn’t fight at all,” she said, her voice thick. She swallowed hard. “I know things are complicated, Mickey, I do, but…he’s right _there_. He’s just one floor up, waiting for you.”

He paused. “We’re trying, Rose.”

“Try harder.” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. In a much different voice she asked, “Is your face okay?”

He released her shoulder and touched his nose gingerly. “Yeah. I’m pretty tough, you know. Takes more than a random banana attack to rough up _my_ classically handsome features.”

Rose grinned. “Maybe it wasn’t random. Maybe the space monkeys think you’re getting too close to the truth.” 

“All right, you lot know that was a _joke_ , don’t you?”

She gave him a gentle shove in the direction of the door. “Go. Finish the expense reports and apologise to Jake.”

“It’s his turn to apologise,” he muttered darkly as he moved to leave. When he reached the door, he paused. “I know this banana stuff is weird, Rose, but we’ll sort it out. We always do.”

“Yeah,” she replied softly. “We do.”

Mickey left, and Rose turned her attention to the impossible bananas at the centre of the table.

When the bananas had first begun appearing en masse, Torchwood had rather sensibly treated them as a potential threat. The fruit had been exposed to an extensive battery of tests, and not one had revealed anything out of the ordinary. They were perfectly normal, everyday bananas.

But there was one test that would never have occurred to them. One that made her sick to her stomach with dread and exhilaration every time she thought of it.

Rose reached into the pocket of her suit coat and pulled out a pair of cheap paper 3-D glasses. After a moment’s hesitation, she slipped them onto her face.

“Oh,” she breathed.

Perfectly normal, everyday bananas that were positively _crawling_ with void stuff.


	2. Chapter 2

“Rose, dinner’s ready!” Jackie’s voice cut through the cool evening air. “That is, if you can find the time in your busy schedule to join us.” A moment later Rose heard her slam the kitchen door closed, the sound echoing across the lawn of the Tyler estate. She sighed and let her head fall back against the wooden wall of Reggie’s old tree house.

Six days since she’d learned that the bananas were falling out of the Void, and she was no closer to discovering what that meant. From the little she knew about the Void, she doubted that the fairly straightforward description of ‘absolute nothingness’ had a fine print clause of ‘aside from the occasional banana’. That left three options, each one more unlikely than the last: the Cybermen, the Daleks, or…

She bit down hard on her bottom lip. Or someone from the other side was sending them through.    

The violent surge of hope that thought inspired worried her deeply. It had been years since she’d allowed herself to imagine the impossible; to begin again would be madness. She brushed her fingers over the cool planks beneath her, the wood worn smooth by years of pirate adventures and travel to the farthest reaches of space. Pete had built the tree house for Reggie the summer her brother had turned four, determined to do the work himself. After he’d nearly been knocked unconscious by a two-by-four, Jackie’d forced him to enlist the help of Mickey and Jake. Despite their boasting, it had taken the three men days to manage it, and even then it always tilted slightly to the left. Rose remembered heckling them from a lawn chair while Jackie made pitcher after pitcher of surprisingly strong lemonade and Reggie chased the cat about the garden.  

It was a golden, sun-dappled memory, but at the time she’d still ached for the places she would never see, the jokes and fights and danger and all the possibilities of a life she no longer led. Four years ago, she would have given anything for the contentment she felt now. 

There was a suspiciously banana-like thunk against the roof of the tree house, and she closed her eyes.

“Rose, I’m _hungry_!” Reggie wailed from the kitchen door. “Shift it!”

“Evil, gap-toothed little gnome,” she muttered and slipped through the hole in the floor, swinging down the rope ladder to land on the grass beneath the tree. The sun had only just fallen below the horizon, the grey evening sky deepening to a muted blue. She shoved her hands in her jeans pockets and shivered; suddenly, the warm light of the distant kitchen windows seemed incredibly appealing. She hurried across the vast lawn of the estate, her trainers squeaking in the damp grass.

Rose was nearly halfway to the house when something large, brown, and person-shaped appeared in the air just over her head and fell to the ground with a pronounced, “Umph!” Caught mid-stride, she tumbled over the sudden obstruction, arms swinging, and landed face first in the grass.

“Next time,” a muffled, impossibly familiar voice panted, “I’m definitely going to insist on travelling first class. I’m far too old to fly coach.”

She scrambled away from the voice, from the – _oh god_ – pinstriped suit and wild hair and the flushed, narrow face that was just _beaming_ at her.

“So what do you think?” the Doctor asked, propping himself up on his elbows and giving her a mad, feverish grin. “Better than a banana?”

Rose gaped at him, speechless and shaking. He couldn’t be here, but he was – she could still feel the impact of his bony frame against her shins, could see his pale skin shining blue in the evening light, his grin beginning to wilt at the edges as he stared at her, waiting. How could he be waiting? He wasn’t real. He wasn’t here.

Somehow, she found her voice. “Well,” she said slowly, “I don’t know. Bananas are an excellent source of potassium.”    

He laughed, a short, jarring sound that seemed too loud in the hushed evening air. There was something in his eyes – nine impossibly long years since she’d seen him last and looking into his eyes she felt every _second_ of it – something that was more than waiting, something more like need. The lines of his body were tightly drawn, his shoulders tense, and there was an unfamiliar restraint in his stillness.

In one smooth movement, she shifted closer to him; he drew in a sharp breath and she felt her own hitch in reply. Lifting her hand, she reached for his face and hesitated, her fingers hovering just above his skin. Then, ever-so-slowly, she let her thumb sweep the line of his cheekbone, her fingertips coming to rest against his temple. His skin was smooth and heated beneath her dew-damp fingers. She pressed her palm to his cheek and felt his jaw shift, tensing at her touch. He held her gaze, his eyes dark and wide.

“Oh,” she said softly. “You’re _here_.”

At that, his restraint broke. A hand in her hair and another at her back and he’d tackled her to the ground, the grass wet and cold beneath her, his too-warm fingers skimming the skin of her face, of her throat. She wanted to laugh but she didn’t have the air for it, because he was _on top_ of her, chest hard against hers, grinning into her temple and hugging her with a fierceness that made the dark sky above them swim in her eyes, and if this wasn’t the maddest thing that had ever happened to her it was absolutely in the top five. He pulled up and away from her suddenly, his knees digging into the ground on either side of her hips, one forearm pressed against the grass to the left of her head. He looked down at her, his shadowed features almost painfully tender.

“Rose,” he said, lingering over the sound of her name, his fingers dancing over her lips like a breath. “You’re not smiling.”

“Sorry,” she replied, her voice thick. “Too happy to smile.”

His eyebrows arched towards his hairline. “Have you broken your face?”

Rose shook her head mutely, drinking in the sight of him. She took a moment to catalogue the details lost to time and fallible human memory – the lines around his eyes, the quirk of his lips, the slight crookedness of his nose. “You’re really here.” She reached up and mirrored his touch, letting her fingers trace his mouth. His eyes closed as he leaned into the caress, dry lips brushing her skin. “I can tell, because in my dreams you’re not usually this smug.”

His eyes flew open. “Oi!”  

She smiled then, and, laughing, threw her arms around his neck, pulling his body back down to hers. “You’re so _easy_.” She pressed her face into his shoulder and something deep within her tightened at the rasp of his suit coat against her cheek. She dug her fingers into the fabric, her hands trembling, clutching him to her with a desperation that swelled inside her like a wave.

He made a noise low in the back of his throat, and she felt the vibration of it. “I’m not going to disappear, Rose,” he said, his voice rough.

She exhaled in a shuddering laugh. “Promise?”

He reached up and gently disentangled her fingers from his suit, pulling away just far enough to meet her eyes. “Look at me.”

She did. The whites of his eyes shone in the faint light, a hard contrast to the near obsidian of his irises, and his lips were parted, his breath coming fast and shallow. _He’s here_ , she thought, and a part of her still did not believe it. He must have seen the doubt in her eyes, because his grip on her hands tightened.

“Suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that you’re so surprised.” He gave her a shaky half-smile and helped her sit up, one hand pressed to her lower back. “After all, I did say it couldn’t be done, and when am I ever wrong?”

She leaned forward, bending into him so they met shoulder to shoulder. The crown of her head bumped against his. “Aside from nearly all the time, you mean?”

“Yes, aside from that.” He pressed his face to her hair and she felt his fingers slip into her sleeve, stealing up the length of her forearm. “You smell like tree sap,” he murmured, running cool fingertips over the skin at the inside of her elbow.

“New perfume,” she replied, her breath quickening.

“Really?”

“No.” His clever fingers found the sensitive, puckered skin of a long-healed injury, and she gasped. “ _Doctor_.”

“What’s this?” he asked, his mouth against her hair. “They feel like…” His thumb smoothed over the souvenir of a rather disastrous encounter with a time-slipped Deinonychus five winters before. “Claw marks?”

“They’re nothing.” She closed her eyes. “Just old scars.” 

“New to me,” he said, and the low-pitched heat of his voice was intoxicating. “Memory doesn’t do you justice, Rose Tyler. Not even mine.” His hand slipped from her sleeve, a moment later settling at the column of her throat, the pad of his thumb brushing over her pulse. “Do you have many?”

His cool fingers at the swell of her jaw; she fought to keep her voice even. “Sorry, I…many what?”

“Scars.”

She opened her eyes and sat back, pulling away to look at him properly. The evening breeze blew her hair into her face, and he helped her push it behind her ear with one hand. She met his steady gaze and understood that this was not an idle question. “A few,” she said after a moment’s hesitation. “But that’s life without a dermal regenerator, I suppose.”     
    
He continued to watch her, and she read the silent request in the darkness of his eyes and the hard line of his jaw. So many things to be said, so many questions needing answers _(he’d fallen from the sky like a piano in pinstripes and ‘impossible’ didn’t even begin to cover it)_ but this – this inventory of her life without him - was something he needed, and she’d never been one to deny him.

“Here,” she said, and reached behind her for the long-fingered hand at her back. Slipping her fingers around his narrow wrist, she moved his hand beneath the hem of her jumper, trapping it between wool and warm skin. She could feel her heartbeat in his touch.

His eyes fell closed, his breath stilling.

She paused, unsure, his palm cold against her back. “Doctor?”

He swallowed, and in his face there rose something raw, some old pain that shuddered through him like a fever. Then he opened his eyes, and it was gone.

He gave her a teasing half-grin, the shift effortless and chameleon-quick. “You were going to give me the grand tour?”

“Right this way, sir,” she said lightly, before pulling his hand up along the trail of her spine, past her bra clasp to the sharp angle of her shoulder blade. In seconds he found the scar. He traced it carefully, fingertips smoothing over the length of new, tight skin. She held his gaze and did not tremble. “Bullet graze,” she explained. “Two months ago.” 

The Doctor nodded, his expression unchanged. His hand stayed on her back.

She took his free hand in her own and brought it to her face, to the underside of her chin. “The roof of an abandoned building in Cincinnati, Ohio. Nearly fell off – only just caught myself in time.” His thumb brushed over the tiny patch of rough skin. “Last Christmas.”

“Traditional Yuletide alien invasion?”

“Corporate espionage gone awry, actually.” She smiled. “Though the corporations involved weren’t exactly local.”

Then to her forearm, and the long, thin scar that stretched from her elbow down to the outside of her wrist. He whistled, impressed, but she could feel his grip on her tighten. He squinted at the scar, a pale line in the blue twilight, and almost unconsciously his fingers settled at her pulse.

“This is a knife wound,” he said, his voice deceptively mild.

“Close.” Her smile bloomed into a wry, lopsided grin. “I fought a broken dishwasher, and the dishwasher won.”

The Doctor watched her, his eyes shuttered, and for a moment Rose imagined he could see through wool and denim to the scars he couldn’t see, the stories she would never share. Nine years apart and she’d done stupid, terrifying things without him – fantastic things – and she’d learnt that, sometimes, you just couldn’t run fast enough.

She knew she wasn’t immortal. She didn’t want to be.

He released her arm, his face like stone. “Reckless.”

She paused. “Sorry?”

“You’ve always—” He stopped himself. “You should be more careful, Rose. You _need_ to be.”

Her grin sharpened. “I see you haven’t quite moved past that ‘do as I say, not as I do’ phase,” she said pleasantly, through her teeth.

For the first time since he’d appeared, he refused to meet her eyes. “I do fine.”

“Oh, I’m sure.” She sat back on her heels and his hand fell away from the skin of her back. “Is that why you dropped in for a visit? To give me a quick pat on the head and tell me to be _careful_?”

He stared at her, agitation and exhaustion writ clear in the tightness around his eyes and the sharp line of his mouth. “That,” he said, “was a very stupid thing to say.”

She bristled. “Don’t call me stupid.”

“I didn’t call you stupid. I’ve never called you stupid.” One hand raked violently through his hair, leaving disaster in its wake. “Except, yes, you are a bit stupid. Because you’d have to be, wouldn’t you, not to see what is apparently _completely_ obvious to half the sentient beings in the universe – that is, the fairly well-known fact that I am, for lack of a better term, apparently completely _stupidly_ in love with you.”

She stared at him, open-mouthed.

He frowned to himself, looking rumpled and a little off-balance. “Hadn’t meant to say that, actually. I forgot how irritating you could be.”

She closed her mouth, and then opened it again. “Did you just—”

“I did.” He squirmed, his hand moving to the back of his neck. “Let’s not make a big thing of it, yeah? It’s just something I said.”

“Just something you said,” she repeated, trying not to sound entirely stunned. “All right.”

“I’m not taking it back or anything, mind you, but it’s not something we need to talk about. We can just move on to something else now.”

She pressed the heel of her palm to her temple and closed her eyes. “Move on from the fact that you—”

“That I’m in love with you, yes.” She opened her eyes just in time to catch his horrified expression. “Listen to me – I’ve said it again. I’m in love with you.” His eyes widened. “It’s like some sort of compulsion. I can’t stop myself.” 

There really was only one response to that – she laughed. It started as a slightly hysterical giggle, which she tried to muffle by pressing her fingers over her mouth, but it soon grew from a giggle to an outright guffaw. He watched in shock as she fell back onto the damp grass, clutching her stomach and shaking with laughter. “Blimey,” she gasped, wiping tears from her eyes, “that has got to be the rudest declaration of love ever made.”

He lay down beside her, propping his head up on his hand and fitting himself to her side. She could feel the swell of his ribs as he breathed. “The rudest, really? Of all the terribly rude declarations that one rude person has made to another, in the whole rude history of this or any other relatively impolite universe, you think _mine_ puts all the rest to shame?” He thought about this for a moment, and then he grinned. “I think I might be sort of flattered.”

She tugged slightly on the knot of his tie and watched him swallow. “ _I_ think you might be sort of mad.”

“Rose,” he said, and though the tone of his voice suggested that there were more words to follow, her finger chose that moment to begin an exploration of the smooth shell of his ear. This path led, quite naturally, to the outline of the nearest sideburn, and tiny hairs tickled her fingertips as she followed curve of his face, brushing along his hairline like a breath until she reached the arch of his forehead. Her hand hovered there for a moment, her fingers light against his skin, and then she let her arm fall back to her side.

His eyes stayed closed, his mouth open and slightly wet. She wasn’t entirely sure he was breathing.

“I don’t…” he began, his voice low. He licked his lips. “I don’t know how to say what I want to say to you.” 

Rose smiled and moved her mouth ever-so-slightly closer to his. “Would a quick game of charades help? Three words, first word has one syllable, sounds like—”

He frowned slightly, his eyes still closed. “Rose, I’m serious.”

“So am I,” she said, resting the pad of her thumb against his chin. “More or less.” She smoothed her fingers along the line of his jaw and around to the nape of his neck. She traced the tendons there with the barest touch of her fingernails, and he shuddered. “You’ve never needed to say anything at all.” His eyes opened, and she gave him a small smile. “You’re actually sort of obvious about it.”

His eyebrows drew together and he sputtered indignantly. “Oi, I most certainly am not! I am alien and inscrutable and—”

She threw one leg over his hip and rolled. His back hit the grass with a thud and he blinked up at her, wide-eyed. “Hello,” he said, sounding rather strangled.

She grinned. “Hello.”

“Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but you seem to be, well…” His voice faded.

“Straddling you?”

His jaw clenched. “Yes. That.”

She wriggled. “Problem?”

“No,” he breathed. “No, just keeping the lines of communication open.”

“That,” she said, placing a palm over each of his hearts, “is an excellent idea. But then, you’re always full of excellent ideas, aren’t you?” She moved against him; his mouth fell open. “Speaking of excellent ideas…”

He watched her face, his eyes half-lidded and unfocused. “I’m open to suggestions,” he said, his voice low.

“Your hands.”

He frowned. “What about them?”

She glanced down at his side, and he followed her gaze. “You’re pulling up my mum’s lawn.”

His fist immediately relaxed its grip, and a clump of dirt and grass fell from between his fingers. “Oops. I’ll…I can fix that. Well, no, I can’t, but I’ll apologise very nicely.”

“Doctor, a hint?” She leaned over him, her hands sliding to his shoulders, her breasts brushing briefly against his chest. “I don’t care about the lawn.”

“Oh,” he said. He gulped. “ _Oh_. You want me to—”

She gave him a shaky smile. “If it wouldn’t be too much trouble.”

“Oh no,” he said, his face illuminated by a sudden, fierce grin. “No trouble at all.” He raised a hand toward her face, but it paused in mid-air. “Then again, with you trouble is pretty much inevitable.”

She sat up, pulling away from him. Over his noise of protest, she said, “Sorry, I don’t seduce hypocrites. Maybe the next skinny bloke who falls from the sky will be more my type.”

She was surprised by how quickly he moved – one moment he was flat on his back and the next his arm was wrapped around her waist, pulling her flush against him. Which is how she found herself straddling the Doctor’s lap as he cupped her face with one hand and said, quite firmly, “I _am_ your type.”

For once fully able to appreciate the angles and edges of his body against hers, she found she couldn’t disagree. She closed her eyes and focused on breathing, on inhale and exhale. On the tiny swells of breath between them.

“You know,” he said, his thumb traveling the length of her lower lip, “as far as I can recall – and, as you know, I recall rather well – I still have yet to say this.” His hand slipped down to the curve of her throat, and he let his mouth linger just above hers. “I missed you, Rose Tyler.” 

She swallowed. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he said, and she could feel his smile against her own.

 _Oh_ , she thought. _So this is how it happens._

Then she felt him jerk back, the arm around her tightening, and a nanosecond later light burned against her closed eyelids. She squinted, his face a blur as her eyes adjusted to the sudden, blinding brightness that illuminated the vast lawn of the Tyler estate.

“Crap,” Rose said. “Floodlights.”

“ _Floodlights_?” He froze. “You mean—”

There was a crackle of static, and an even, mild voice echoed around them: “Everything all right out there, Rose?”

She let out a choked laugh and waved in the direction of the security cameras. “Oh my god,” she said, smiling and entirely mortified. “That’s my dad. I’m sitting in your lap, and that’s my dad.”  

The Doctor didn’t move a muscle; he hardly seemed to breathe. “This sort of thing,” he said through his teeth, “is not supposed to happen to me.”

Pete Tyler cleared his throat, and the sound reverberated across the lawn. “Jackie was getting a bit worried, so I thought I’d check up on you. Didn’t realise we had company.” He didn’t bother to hide his amusement. “It’s good to see you again, Doctor. I’m sure Jacks will want you to stay for dinner.” 

The Doctor gave the cameras a thumbs-up. “Dinner,” he said around a large, strained grin. “Dinner with your mum.” He laughed without moving his lips. “Save me. Save me or kill me now.”

Rose rolled her eyes. “Shut up. You know you missed her.”

His grin turned genuine and he gave her a small squeeze. “Maybe. But I’ll never admit it.”

The speakers crackled again. “Oh, and Doctor?” Pete’s disembodied voice was stern. “Watch your hands.”

The hand that had settled rather low on her hip twitched like a hunted animal and jerked away. A moment later, the lights blinked out, and the lawn was dark again.

Rose rested her forehead against his shoulder and sighed. “We’ve got to go in now. There’s no escape.”

He snorted. “Oh, so it’s all right for you to complain, but I—” He stopped. “Rose, what is that?”

She twisted, trying to follow his gaze. Her brother’s freckled face was pressed against the kitchen window, his nose turning up like a pig’s snout. “That,” she said, “is Reggie.”

“Reggie?”

“Reginald Prentice Tyler. My brother.” Reggie opened his mouth against the glass and exhaled until his cheeks puffed out like a chipmunk’s. Rose turned back to the Doctor. “He’s eight,” she said, as if that explained everything.

“You have a brother.” The Doctor ran a hand through his hair, a little stunned. “A brother named _Reginald._ ” He shook his head. “Honestly, your mother is a mad woman. Didn’t anyone try to stop her?”

“My mum, after seven hours of labour and no drugs?” She eased off him and stood, brushing grass from her trousers. “Would _you_ have argued?”  

He rose to his feet. “I see your point,” he said, and they grinned at each other. After a moment she stuck her hands in her pockets, feeling strangely shy.

“You’re tall,” she said. “I’d forgotten.”

“Your hair is different.” He brushed it out of her eyes, off her forehead. “It doesn’t really suit you.” 

“I know.” She shrugged. “It’ll grow out.”

“It was nice long.”

She gave him a small smile. “That was more than a decade ago.”

“It was still nice.”

There was a moment of almost awkward silence, and she was thinking about all the fuss that went into long hair _(and wouldn’t it be a bit impractical, given her penchant for tight scrapes and travel without a hair dryer?)_ when she looked into the Doctor’s eyes and suddenly realised that she was a thirty-year-old woman with a life, he was a restless alien commitment-phobe in the wrong universe, and, despite the impossible joy still fizzing through her, she still had no earthly idea what _came next_.

She broke the silence with the first coherent question that popped into her head. “Where’s the TARDIS?”

He tucked his hands into his pockets. “Oh, she’ll be along shortly. There was an…” he cleared his throat, “incident of sorts, so we had to take separate flights. As it were.”

She arched one eyebrow. “An incident?”

He rocked back onto his heels and nodded. “Apparently the Villengard military police is still a bit steamed over that nonsense with their munitions division – not that they haven’t since made a tidy little fortune in the daiquiri business, mind you. And, honestly, a simple _thanks for vaporising our big nasty weapons factory_ would have sufficed, but I can’t say I was exactly surprised when my welcome back party was all laser blasters and ‘You there, unhand that banana—’”

There was a distinctly unTARDIS-like crash from a distant grove of trees, and the Doctor grinned. “That’ll be the old girl now.” He offered her his arm. “Want to go say hello?” 

Rose looked behind her. Her family’s house was large and solid and familiar, the kitchen windows warm with light. For a moment, she hesitated. She turned back to him.

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I do.”

She slipped her arm through his, and they walked away from the house.

“So,” she said, leaning into his side a little more with each step. “Bananas?” 

He blinked down at her. “Oh, you noticed those, did you?”

She smacked his arm. “Noticed them? You maniac, I’ve been _drowning_ in them. Everywhere I go, everywhere I’ve _been_ —” She gave him a stern look. “Mickey had theories, you know. He’s going to be awfully disappointed.”      

“Mickey!” he crowed suddenly, making her jump. “How is the old Mr. Mickey, then?”

“Gay,” Rose said.

The Doctor beamed. “Brilliant! Always was a cheerful bloke, when he wasn’t glaring at me and muttering under his breath about girlfriend-snatching alie—” He paused. “That’s not what you meant.” 

She smiled into his shoulder. “Nope.”

He thought this over for a moment. “Jake?”

She made an impressed sound in the back of her throat. “Well done. Wouldn’t have thought you’d pick up on that.”

He shrugged. “What can I say? I have a keen understanding of the human mind.”

She patted his arm. “Of course you do, dear.”

His nose wrinkled. “Is that what you’re going to call me from now on? _Dear_?” He sniffed. “‘What exciting adventures will we have today, _dear_?’ ‘My, what a spiffy tie you’re wearing, _dear_.’ ‘No, _dear_ , you have the last biscuit – you satisfy me so completely that I have no need of chocolate.’” He nudged her with his elbow and gave her a suggestive grin. “I like it.”

To her horror, she began to blush. “You,” she said, “are a nutter.” 

“And you,” he replied, “are not a little bit odd yourself.” He bent down and brushed his lips against her temple. “Dear.”

She slid her hand down to his and watched as their fingers linked together. “Doctor, when you say _from now on_ , what do you—”

He jumped ahead of her, tugging her along by their joined hands and walking backwards as he spoke. “For shame, Rose Tyler. Aren’t you even the least bit curious about what I was doing with all those bananas?”

She gave him an ‘aw shucks’ sort of look and said, “Gee, I don’t know. Trans-voidal target practice with basic organic matter?”

He stopped walking mid-step; she bumped into him, dropping his hand. “Yes,” he said, staring at her. “That’s exactly what I was doing.”

She nodded. “I figured.” She stepped around him and continued in the direction of the TARDIS. “Theoretically speaking, the boundaries between parallel universes are, in their natural state, porous. There’s the Void in between, of course, but if you could predict an alignment of these naturally occurring gaps it would simply be a matter of slipping through from one side to the other.” She chuckled darkly. “But the Daleks’ Void Ship punched a hole through those boundaries, and the Cybermen nearly fractured them beyond repair. When you sealed the breach, you sealed everything – you had to. No more gaps, no way through.” She felt his stare and smiled thinly at him. “What, you think you say ‘impossible’ and I just take your word for it?” 

He took her hand again and squeezed it. “Rose, I—”

She resumed her lecture, ignoring the cold damp seeping through her trainers and socks as she walked. “But eventually things would go back to the way they should be. Time heals all wounds, and so on. The gaps would appear again, and, theoretically speaking, travel between universes would be possible.” She shook her head. “I say ‘theoretically’ because every expert I bullied into talking to me insisted that gap alignments were and would always be impossible to predict, and that even if you _could_ make it through to the other side without getting stranded in the Void for the rest of eternity, there’d be no way to control where or when you’d end up.” She looked up at him. “But you did.”

The Doctor’s hand went to the back of his neck, and his expression turned rueful. “It was,” he said, “a bit like playing darts.”

She watched his profile, blue and shadowed in the fading twilight. “Darts.”

“Yes. Like playing darts while blindfolded in an infinitely large room, with both hands tied behind my back and a rather impatient squadron of 51st century police officers at the door.” He paused. “Also, there was an almost sickening amount of immensely complex mathematics involved.” 

She considered this. “And I was the bullseye?”

He smiled. “Quite.”

They passed into a copse of birch trees, white bark shining silver in the moonlight and the glow of the city. They walked in silence for a long moment, hand in hand. Then she said, “I should punch you in the mouth.”

“All right,” he said. “Are you going to tell me why first?”

She stepped in front of him, forcing him to face her. “You could have died.”

He frowned. “But I didn’t.”

“But you could have.” She felt sick to her stomach and suddenly, horribly angry. Her grip on his hand tightened. “I don’t care how clever you are – every time you sent a banana through from your universe to mine you had _no idea_ where it would end up. Maybe a thousand made it here to me – how many more are trapped in the Void? How many missed me entirely and fell into oceans or volcanoes or, I don’t know, poorly supervised vats of acid—”

“Blimey. Rough universe.”

“This isn’t funny,” she said, and it sounded less like words than like a sound someone makes just before they burst into tears. “What if you’d died? What if you’d died and it wasn’t because you were out in the universe being you but because I stood there on that _stupid_ beach crying like some heartsick little fool, and you thought—” She stopped, turned away from him. Dragged the sleeve of her jumper over her eyes, and when she looked up the trees were a pale blur against the night sky. “You stupid idiot,” she said. “You could’ve been liquefied by my office copier.”

He touched her shoulder, his fingers curling over her collarbone. Gently, he pulled her to him, turning her until her cheek rested against the rough fabric of his suit jacket. “I didn’t come here because I thought you needed me, Rose.” He smoothed a hand over her hair. “I knew you didn’t.”

“I did.” She wrapped her fingers around his tie, almost clinging. “I do.”

“Nah. You haven’t needed me for ages. Maybe in the beginning, when every time you went missing I’d find you locked in some room full of zombies or Autons or deadly solar radiation—” 

“Yeah,” she said, her voice as dry as paper, “because that sort of thing never happens to you.”

“Exactly my point. Well, not exactly. In the right neighborhood, though.” He held her closer, and his chin bumped against her forehead. “I didn’t come because you needed me.” 

It was the perfect opening, and she took it. “Then why?”

The question seemed to take him by surprise. There was a moment of stunned silence. “Well, because I could, I suppose. I never stopped to think—” He paused, and she could feel the tension in the hands on her back, in his chest against hers. “Do you wish I’d stayed away?”

She wanted to laugh, wanted to say _no, of course not, have you lost your mind?_ But she didn’t. She didn’t say anything at all for a long moment, and his hands twitched and fell back to his sides. He stepped away.

“The TARDIS isn’t far,” he said, not meeting her eyes. “Just past those trees.” She watched his back as he walked away. She didn’t follow.

“I have a life here,” she said, and he stopped, a dark silhouette among the pale trees. “I have Mum and Pete and Reggie and Mickey and Jake. I have a job that I’m good at, a job that matters.” She paused. “I matter.”

He made a low, strangled noise and turned back to her. “You’ve always—”

“It’s not the same.” She stepped toward him. “I’ve been in love with you since I was nineteen. But I’m not nineteen anymore, and I’m not twenty. I’m a daughter and a sister and a best friend, and I _understand_ now, I really do. I had the life I wanted and I lost it, so I learned to live for them instead. I pull pranks with Reggie and have tea every Sunday with Mum, and sometimes my best mates and I blow up a spaceship and save the world.” She watched his face for a long moment. “I’m happy.”

His expression was shuttered, impossible to read. “Yes. Well, I’d hoped you would be.”

She shoved her hands in her pockets, hunching her shoulders. “Did you?”

He flinched, his head jerking up, and he finally met her eyes. “Of course. _Of course_ I did. How could you—” He took a step closer, then stopped. “Rose, I—”

She shook her head, stepping back. “I know. I’m sorry, I don’t know why I said that.” She looked down at her soggy trainers. “I missed you for so long, and all that time I never really thought…” Her voice trailed off. “I don’t know how to feel.”  

He exhaled a long breath. “Funny. I know exactly what you mean.” The stiffness of his posture eased, and he offered her his arm. “Cup of tea?”

She gave him a weak smile and slid her hand into the crook of his elbow. “You’re a genius.”

He chuckled, and the sound was only a little strained. “That’s what they tell me.”

The TARDIS had landed on a tree. The birch’s trunk had splintered on impact, and the blue box stood in the middle of the wreckage, tipped at a precarious angle. At the sight Rose’s hand fell from the Doctor’s arm, and she jerked forward into a run. She tripped forward, stumbling over fallen branches, and when she reached the door the wood was warm beneath her hands, almost feverish. She reached for the chain around her neck, and then her hands stilled. She turned and met his eyes, something cold and sharp expanding in the pit of her stomach.

“I lost it,” she said. “The key. I lost it, years ago.”

The chain had slipped from her neck one day, and it’d been nearly a week before she’d noticed it was gone. It had been a small loss, easy to forget amidst the ever-widening sea of things missing. Now her neck felt naked, and she was glad she couldn’t read his expression. For once, she didn’t want to know. 

The Doctor nodded. “I thought that might happen,” he said. He walked toward her, stepping carefully around the splintered remains of the birch. When he stood in front of her, he reached into the inside breast pocket of his suit coat. He took her hand and poured the chain into her open palm. The key fell last, warm against her skin where the links of the chain were cool, and she swallowed around the relief in her throat.

“Thank you,” she said.

“It’s your spare,” he said. “I was just carrying it for you.” 

Rose fit the key into the lock and opened the door.

It was, for a moment, like stepping into the impossible ship for the first time. She’d forgotten the size of it, the graceful curve of the walls and the hum from beneath her feet. She pressed her palm against a nearby coral strut, steadying herself against a sudden wave of vertigo. She nearly stepped back again, back to the damp grass and steady earth waiting outside. Instead, she leaned her shoulder into the curve of the strut and grinned.  _Hello,_ she thought. _Bet you didn’t think you’d be seeing me again._

Telepathic or not, the TARDIS wasn’t a person. It didn’t think like a person or feel like a person, and it _certainly_ didn’t answer her with a self-satisfied little hum when she gave it a pat. That would be impossible, and quite silly besides.

“She’s happy to see you,” the Doctor said from behind her, sounding the slightest bit surprised. Rose thought that after the centuries he’d spent shamelessly anthropomorphizing the old girl, it was only natural that the ship should pick up a few ideas of its own. 

Rose climbed the stairs. “Maybe she thinks I’m here to do a little spring cleaning,” she said. The console room was wrecked. Wires and emergency masks dangled from the ceiling, and one of the monitors had fallen from the console and lay shattered on the floor. The frayed jump seat was nowhere to be seen, but a striped armchair had been overturned and its upholstery ripped. Scattered across the floor were bits of white china that had probably once been a tea set.

The console itself was almost unrecognizable; while Rose had only learned to use the most basic TARDIS controls, she knew the rest by sight, if not by function. But now nothing looked familiar, and the levers and knobs and dials seemed even more makeshift and haphazard than before. She frowned and pointed. “Is that part of a blender?”

“No.” He gave the console a second, considering look. “Yes.”

She bent down and picked up a piece of broken china. The pattern wasn’t one she remembered. “Doctor, how long—”

He plucked the china out of her hand. “Rose Tyler, I’m ashamed of you. The TARDIS braves the hordes of Villengard, crosses the screaming emptiness of the Void, and somehow lands right here in your back garden, and what do you do? You – heartless, shallow thing – _you_ criticise her _housekeeping_.”

Rose bit down on a smile. “You’re right. I’m terribly sorry.”

“Apology accepted.” He tossed the shard of china tea set over his shoulder. “Anyway, a little mess is to be expected when one does the impossible.”

She leaned back against the console. “Speaking of.”

“Yes?”

She looked up, tipping her head in the direction of the vaulted ceiling. “The lights are still on.”

He grinned. “You noticed that, did you?”

“I notice all sorts of things. It’s kind of what I do.” She gave him a severe look. “Last time the TARDIS was in this universe, it nearly killed her.”

“Ah, but that was before I invented this.” He reached behind her and pulled a piece of equipment from the console. It was shaped rather like a sea anemone, if sea anemones were made from a Jell-O mold and half a battered transistor radio. “It’s a Vortextual translator circuit. Translation unit.” He paused. “Translating thingy.”

She raised an eyebrow, and he tossed it back onto the console.

“Well,” he said, “I’m still working on the name.”  

She nodded, slowly. “It lets the TARDIS draw energy from this universe’s Vortex.”

“That’s a gross oversimplification, but yes. It does pretty much exactly that.” His grin turned rakish. “Impressive, yeah?”

“Very.” She looked at him again, at the deepened lines around his eyes and the touches of grey at his temples. “Nine years is a long time,” she said. She touched his cheek. “It’s been longer for you.”  
   
His smile faded. “Yes,” he said. “Much longer.”

She waited for him to say more; she should have known he wouldn’t. After a moment’s silence he slipped his hand into hers, pulling it away from his face. “You know,” he said, “I forgot to ask.” The calloused pad of his thumb brushed her palm. “Are you married?”

Rose paused, very carefully. “Are you?” 

“No! Of course not!” He sputtered for a moment, taking a step back. “Why would you even—”

“You do all sorts of mad things. Don’t see why you couldn’t do that as well.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m not married.”

“Oh.” A look of deep and uncomfortable concentration passed over his face. “Are you currently or have you recently been in some other sort of exclusive, committed relationship?” 

She blinked at him. “Are you deranged?”

“It’s a perfectly legitimate question!”

“It’s a perfectly idiotic question. Don’t you think I would’ve mentioned it if I—” She stopped, her eyes narrowing. “And since when do you know words like _committed_ , and _relationship_?”

He took another few steps closer, and she found herself trapped between his body and the console. “I know a lot of words, Rose.”

“I don’t doubt it.” She leaned forward, smirking. “ _Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus_ wasn’t about what you thought it would be, huh?”

He frowned. “That title is misleading.”

“You should stop reading. It might give you Ideas.”

“It wasn’t the books,” he said. He turned away, his hand moving to the back of his neck. “Well, it was, but I had this friend – you would’ve liked her, I think, or possibly hated her, I can never tell with those sorts of things – I met her just after Canary Wharf, so she knew about—” He made a complicated hand gesture, which Rose translated as _you_ and _parallel universes_ and _these inconvenient human emotions_. “And this friend, she said – and by _said_ I mean _shouted_ – that I was a bloody alien idiot if just I showed up at your door expecting you to still—” He made another awkward hand gesture, “you know. Particularly given that we’d never actually…” The hand continued to flap, somewhat desperately.

Rose took pity on him. “Had sex?”

The Doctor blushed. Fiercely. “Talked. We’d never talked about anything.” He dragged a hand over his face, looking wretched. “I knew I’d be terrible at this, but I was rather hoping that you might help the conversation along a little.”

She frowned at him. “I’d help the conversation along a bit more if I knew what the hell we were having a conversation _about_.”

The Doctor rolled his eyes to the ceiling in exasperation. “Stubborn bloody _humans_ ,” he said, and kissed her.

It wasn’t a very long kiss, or a particularly good one. Rose barely had time to register the press of his fingers against her face and his hair eclipsing the green-gold light of the time rotor before he was pulling away again, his lips leaving hers with a soft sort of smacking sound. He didn’t move his hands from her face; his fingers were cool against her skin.

“I didn’t come here because I thought you needed me,” he said, his voice low. “I knew you didn’t. I didn’t come because I missed you, though I did. I didn’t come because I love you, though I think I must, given the evidence.” His thumb traced the curve of her cheek. “I came back because I’m old and tired and selfish, Rose, and I wanted to see you again. Because I finally could, and I didn’t think of the consequences.”

Rose closed her eyes. There was a sour taste in her mouth, like metal and blood and heartbreak, and she almost didn’t have the breath to say what needed to be said. “I can’t go with you.” She turned her face away, and his hands fell to his sides. “I’m sorry. I can’t leave them again.”

There was a silence. “If you can’t come with me,” he said, “can I come with you?”

Her eyes snapped open. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” he said, his expression wary. “What do you want it to mean?”

Her fingers curled into fists. “Doctor—”

“It means that I would stay.” He seemed to warm to the idea, and he took her hand, twining their fingers together. “That we would stay. Here. In this universe. On this planet, if you want. Just—” He winced. “Not in your mother’s house.”

She shook her head. “No. You can’t stop travelling.”

“Who says?”

She stepped to the side, away from the console and the clearly mad alien man beside it. “It’s not that simple.”

He grinned, arms spread wide. “Why not?”  
   
Rose tripped over the wrecked armchair, and a bit of stuffing clung to her leg. “You’re insane. I once saw you have a mild nervous breakdown over the very thought of being stuck with a mortgage and a job and a normal sort of life. You can’t possibly think—”

The Doctor followed her, stepping around the armchair with ease. “Do you have a mortgage?”

“Of course not,” she said. “I rent a flat.”

His grin widened. “Spend a lot of time in this flat, do you?”

Rose’s flat wasn’t much more than a convenient place to keep her luggage between trips; she glared at him, backing away until she hit the metal railing. “I work a lot.”

He leaned in close, his hands gripping the railing on either side of her, caging her in. “And what sort of work do you do, again?”

“Oh, you know,” she said blithely. “Save the planet. Negotiate intergalactic treaties. Fill out paperwork. Your typical 9 to 5.”

“I’m very good with paperwork.”

It was a struggle not to laugh at the very idea of the Doctor filling out expense reports. “Are you saying that you want to stay in this universe so you can be my personal assistant?”

“Is that a job offer?” he asked. She’d meant it as a joke, of course, but he wasn’t laughing. Wasn’t even smiling, and the serious set of his jaw made her stomach clench in anxiety, or excitement, or some other emotion entirely, and suddenly the narrow procession of day after day after day seemed to expand before her, unfurling into a world of possibilities.

“You’re mad,” she said. He didn’t contradict her.

“We’re a good team,” he said. “A great one, even. And we’ll have the TARDIS for the occasional off-planet holiday.”

She closed her eyes and gripped the metal railing behind her, a little overwhelmed. She loved her job, she did, but the thought of travelling in the TARDIS again, of living that life again, the life she’d thought she lost forever – “You know you’ll have to put out,” she said. “If you’re going to be my secretary.”

He chuckled then, his breath cool against her cheek, and she felt his fingers skim the nape of her neck, curling into her too-short hair. “I believe you’ll find,” he said, “that the correct term is _executive assistant_.”

Eyes still closed, she leaned into him until their noses bumped. Her lips brushed his chin and she smiled against the rasp of his stubble. “How about _sidekick_? Does _sidekick_ work for you?”

His fingers found the curve of her skull, the soft skin behind her ears. She shivered into the touch, and could almost hear him grin. “Whatever you say, Ms. Tyler,” he said silkily, and she was about to laugh when he dipped his head and touched his mouth to hers, hands in her hair, lips still and slightly open. They stood for an airless moment, poised between a kiss and something less, and then she let herself fall into him, let her fingers clutch at the familiar fabric of his suit coat and pull him desperately closer, and when she finally opened her mouth under his she was glad of every moment they’d spent apart.

“Absence makes the heart grow fonder?” he asked, lips at the corner of her mouth, at the delicate skin over her pulse.

“No,” she said, breathless. “A watched pot never boils.”

She staggered backwards, his hands at her waist, all hunger and hard edges and sudden heat as the metal railing groaned under their weight. “Isn’t that,” he murmured, “the pot calling the kettle black?”  
     
“I am not the pot in this scenario,” she said, and then bit down on a particularly undignified noise when his teeth scraped her collarbone and the world flared white around the edges.

His hands slipped beneath her jumper, long fingers tracing her ribs. “I think,” he said, “that we’ve reached the limits of this particular metaphor,” and then there was a horrible screeching sound and a lurch and the railing collapsed out from under them. Rose landed hard on the grated floor below; the Doctor landed on Rose.

Rose took a moment to assess her injuries, then blinked the stars from her eyes. “Cool,” she said, hooking her leg around his hips. “Horizontal surface.”

“I love you,” the Doctor said, and kissed her, open-mouthed and somewhat messily.  

“Oh, gross,” Reggie said from the broken railing. “That’s just _wrong_.”

 

++

  
Rose hadn’t realised how much she’d enjoyed being an only child until she wasn’t one anymore.  
   
“You absolute _moron_ ,” she seethed, red-faced and tugging futilely under her jumper at the still half-undone clasp of her bra. “What the hell were you thinking, wandering into a strange space ship like that? You didn’t even knock!”

Reggie picked up the Vortexual translator circuit and turned it over carelessly in his hands. “Please. It’s a big blue box with _Police_ written on the front. What other space ship could it possibly be?”   
   
Rose turned to the Doctor for help, but he just shrugged. She gave him a look that quite clearly said, _You are useless, and I will remember this moment next time you want to take off my clothes_ , and then snatched the translator circuit from her brother’s hands. “Mum is going to kill you if she finds out you were in here.”

Reggie grinned. “And who’s going to tell her? You’re, like, five times more scared of her than I am.”

“I am _not_.” 

“Are too.”

“Reginald Prentice Tyler,” Rose growled, but before she could finish her threat Reggie ducked around the console and ran for the corridor that led to the rest of the TARDIS’ many rooms.

Reggie was fast, but Rose was faster – a moment later she had him in a headlock and was dragging him back to the console room. The Doctor watched the struggle from the sidelines, wide-eyed.

“We are never procreating,” he said, sinking down into the mangled armchair, his expression horrified. “For no reason. Absolutely not.”

“Oi!” Reggie said. “No nuggies!” 

“I’m not even sure we should be allowed to have a dog,” the Doctor said.  
   
Rose grabbed the Doctor’s arm and pulled him out of the armchair before shoving Reggie into it. The cushion springs made a pitiful twanging sound. Rose took a deep, calming breath, then reached behind her back and fixed her bra clasp. “Doctor, this is my brother Reggie. Reggie, this is the Doctor.”

The Doctor and Reggie each nodded in the other’s general direction, not quite meeting each other’s eyes. Reggie folded his arms over his chest. “So. This is your space ship, then.”

“It’s called the TARDIS,” the Doctor said. “T-A-R-D-I-S. Time And Relative Dimension In Space.”

Reggie sighed as only an eight year old boy can sigh – at once communicating his boredom, your painful ineptitude, and an unfulfilled longing for a Game Boy.

The Doctor stared at him expectantly. “Well?” he said.

Reggie scowled. “Well what?”

“It’s bigger on the inside,” the Doctor said gently, as if he thought Reggie might be a little slow but was too polite to say anything about it.

Reggie sighed again, compounding the effect with a roll of his eyes. “I’ve only been hearing stories about the TARDIS since I was _born_.” He looked up at Rose. “I thought you said he was clever.”

“He usually is,” Rose said.

Reggie leaned forward in the chair, his expression fierce. “Then why’d it take so long for him to come back, huh? And, what, now that he’s finally shown up he just expects you drop everything and leave with him like you did before?” He looked away. “Mum started crying when she heard he was here. She said she was happy, but I don’t think she was. I think she knows you’re going to leave.”

Rose opened her mouth to argue, but the Doctor touched her arm and she closed it again. He crouched in front of the armchair and met Reggie’s eyes. “Rose isn’t leaving,” he said, his voice even. “I didn’t ask her to, but even if I had – she wouldn’t have said yes.”

Reggie’s hard expression didn’t change. “Why’d you come if you weren’t going to ask her to go with you?”

“I might’ve asked, if things had been different. I didn’t know anything about her life before tonight. I wasn’t even sure how long it would have been for her since we’d separated.”

“She could’ve had kids and stuff,” Reggie said, nodding in comprehension. “She could’ve been dead.”

“ _Reg_ ,” Rose said, but the Doctor nodded. 

“She could’ve been,” he agreed. “Time travel’s like that. No matter how hard you try, you always seem to be too late.”

Reggie thought about this for a moment, picking at a tear in the upholstery. “If you hadn’t come back, you never would’ve known. You can’t be too late if you never show up at all.”

The Doctor smiled and looked as old as Rose had ever seen him. “I thought like that for a long time.”

Reggie frowned. “Why’d you change your mind?” 

The Doctor shrugged. “I didn’t, really. I don’t know what you’ve heard about me, Reggie, but I’m an old coward at heart. A clever old coward, and once I’d figured how to get here I distracted myself with gadgets and bananas and maths so I wouldn’t have to think about what I’d find when I succeeded.” He stood and slipped his hands into his pockets. “Also, I really wanted to snog your sister.” 

Reggie mimed sticking his finger down his throat, gagging.

“Charming,” Rose said, and curled her hand over the Doctor’s shoulder, reaching up to kiss him on the cheek. He turned into her, smiling, and her lips found the corner of his mouth.

“Geez,” Reggie said. “You guys are almost as bad as Mickey and Jake.”

Rose went still, eyes wide with disbelief. “Mickey and Jake were—”

“I walked in on them snogging in the laundry room before dinner.” Reggie’s face scrunched up a little at the memory. “I don’t think they’re mad at each other anymore.”

The Doctor’s hand settled low on Rose’s back. “Is this universe always this exciting, or is it only when I’m around?”

“Let me put it this way,” Rose said. “I’m a lot better at Sudoku than I used to be.”

Reggie let his head fall back against the armchair with a thump. “I’m _bored_. Can we go see the rest of the TARDIS now?”

“Absolutely not,” Rose said, just as the Doctor said, “We could start with the arboretum, if you like.” Their eyes locked – Rose glaring, the Doctor looking rather nervous.

“Reggie,” Rose said, still glaring, “aren’t you hungry? We were supposed to have dinner ages ago.”

Reggie snorted. “Are you kidding? It’s Mum’s night to cook; Dad snuck me a sandwich after I got home from school.”

“He did _what_?” Jackie thundered, stomping up the ramp to the console room in a storm of velour and sweet-smelling perfume. “Reginald Prentice Tyler, when I say ‘stay in the house or I’ll set all your video games on fire,’ I _mean_ ‘stay in the house or I’ll—’” She paused, looking around the TARDIS. “What the hell happened in here?”

The Doctor’s eyes narrowed. “Well, hello to you too, Jackie.”  

“Oh, come here, you great alien git,” Jackie said, and threw her arms around him in a crushing hug. The Doctor squeaked, and one pinstripe-clad arm flailed back and forth, as if calling for help.

“This is absolutely nothing like I imagined it,” Pete said from the door, staring up at the vaulted ceiling, his face bathed green in the glow of the time rotor. 

Mickey followed him through the door and clapped him on the shoulder. “It’s better, yeah?”  
   
“Food coming through,” Jake said, his arms full of takeaway bags. He slipped past Pete and Mickey and carried the bags up to Rose. “There was an incident with the roast, so we’ve got Chinese. Is there a table in here somewhere?”

“The console will do,” Rose said, and helped him unpack carton after carton, narrowly avoiding the levers and more ominous looking buttons. The smell of kung pao chicken filled the TARDIS. 

“Dibs on the egg rolls,” Reggie said, darting out of the armchair and grabbing a carton. Mickey wrapped an arm around his waist and lifted him into the air.

“I don’t think so, pipsqueak,” Mickey said. When he snatched the carton from Reggie’s hand, the boy tried to bite him. “ _Oi!_ ”  
   
Pete and Jackie were bickering about something – Rose heard the words _pot roast_ and _fire extinguisher_ and _bloody disgusting banana bread_ – and Jake had been pulled into the battle over the egg rolls, trying to keep Mickey from getting chewed on and Reggie from getting dropped head first onto the floor. Rose and the Doctor stood back from the chaos, watching.

“It’s okay if this is too much for you,” Rose said quietly. “I’d understand.”

The Doctor took her hand, fingers fitting smoothly into hers. “No,” he said with a smile. “It’ll be an adventure.”

It was.   

++

A few months later Reggie looked up from his bowl of cereal. “Oh! I get it now.”

Jackie closed the refrigerator door. “Get what, love?” 

“A banana is funny because it’s shaped like a penis.” He sat back in his chair, shaking his head. “The Doctor is _weird_.”


End file.
